Syrian Electronic Army Hacks Twitter Account Of UK’s ITV News

Yesterday, the Twitter account of UK’s biggest commercial TV station ITV News was hacked by supporters of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, just after the day Twitter enhanced security to prevent such attacks.

Last Wednesday, Twitter announced that it had started rolling out a new two-step verification feature. Under this new two-step verification feature, Twitter will send a password to the user’s mobile every time he or she logs in. Users will have to enter that password promptly to log in into Twitter. On Thursday, Twitter enabled this two-step authentication security feature to stop Syrian Electronic Army from hacking the microblogging site. But it seems like the ITV News failed to enable this two-step verification feature in their Twitter account @itvlondon and the following day afternoon (that is, on Friday), Syrian Electronic Army hacked ITV News’ Twitter account.

After that, the hackers tweeted, “Just kidding. The Syrian Electronic Army was here. #SEA via @Official_SEA12.” On the other side, one of the hackers’ tweets linked to a newspaper story headlined: “In battle against hackers like the Syrian Electronic Army, Twitter introduces extra security measures.”

As soon as ITV came to know about the hack, the TV station said on its national Twitter account, “We are aware that the @itvlondon account has been infiltrated and are working to return to normal service as soon as possible.”

Later, an ITV spokesman said, “The ITV News London Twitter account was compromised for a short time but has now been secured and the Tweets have been deleted.” The spokesman also mentioned that the security breach was triggered by a phishing email. When he was asked whether ITV News had enabled the two-step authentication security feature to its account or not, he replied he was not “sure.”